The following tragic story will illustrate why we can get media coverage for your product … lots of it.
One day I noticed a woman in my wife Robin’s office. She was crying. For about three hours. When she left, I asked “What was that about?” Robin said, “I’m touched. Her name is Sheryl Hill and her son Tyler died needlessly while studying abroad. She hired a PR firm to draw attention to ClearCause Foundation, a non-profit organization she started to save other kids. She spent $35,000 of her son’s life insurance settlement and got zero publicity. She’s just sick about it.”
We decided to give her some free help. Within a few months our publicists arranged a couple dozen media interviews for her. Honestly, it was easy. She had a heartfelt topic, she wrote the book Walking On Sunshine about her experience, and she created the non-profit. All for the purpose of helping parents make sure their kids return home safely.
So how does a well-known PR firm flop on an easy project like this?
The same reason the PR industry has flopped for a hundred years: Pricing.
When it comes to arranging publicity, the industry pricing model is simple: bill hourly and don’t guarantee results. That may be an ok pricing model for services such as crisis management, lobbying, investor relations, etc., but not publicity.
Pricing publicity by the hour with no guarantee of arranging any is, to use a playground word, stupid. Imagine how few pizzas would be sold if the industry standard was to charge hourly with no guarantee you would get a pizza. Seriously, it’s really dumb.
And it produces an internal culture of low accountability. Once again, imagine a pizza business where it was ok to take a customer’s money but not provide a pizza.
So for 25 years we’ve charged per story, not by the hour, and we’ve arranged tens-of-thousands of media stories. Now, guess what our company culture is like? Yep, it’s a scramble. A little like working in the kitchen at Papa Johns. When you’re paid per story you arrange, it puts a little pep in your step. The more we deliver, the more money we make! It’s in our DNA to produce publicity. Even when we work free, we’re hard-wired to deliver.
Are you getting it? Paid by the hour, got nothing. Worked with us, got dozens of media stories. One little twist: Pricing.
If you have a product that would benefit from more media coverage, test us and see how we do. Call Heather Champine at 952-697-5269. You might be surprised at how many reporters and producers are interested in telling their audiences about your product.
